Other Side
by Kirachu
Summary: Ban dreams and remembers his life as it flashes before his eyes.


**Other Side**

* * *

Gnarled fingers close around his shoulder. He still hears her voice, that woman's, so near to him and yet still so far away. She screams, sobs, voice choked and strained. 

That child is not mine, she says. That child is a demon. 

The ancient fingers on his shoulder tighten. He stares at the open door, at the woman huddled in her bed, hands pressed tight over her face, and the man standing over her, hands on her shoulders the same way the old woman's hands are on his. This is how he remembers her face. Tear-streaked, dark hair clinging to her wet cheeks, hands against her eyes. Her eyes he can't remember. Just that hollow, screaming voice, and that mouth twisted in a cry. 

That child is not mine, she screams, and it echoes in his head. That is a demon's child. 

"Ban," the old woman says, and her voice is cracked, strained, old, "you will endure many hardships in your life. You are the one to inherit these cursed eyes of mine." 

He doesn't understand the words then. Can't begin to comprehend their meaning. Can't think of anything but that woman, sobbing, screaming, denying him. His mother. 

It hurts. A small part of him hurts, but he shuts it away, blocks himself against it and against anyone who might hurt him. 

He doesn't care. Can't care. 

He's with the old woman now, some estate in Germany, some huge house that reeks of age and dust. Most of his hours are spent in the library, pouring over volume and volume, learning everything he can, studying every day. Sometimes it is under the watchful, hard eyes of the old woman, sometimes not. She reprimands him when he needs it, but leaves him on his own most of the time, and he learns to live that way. Depending on himself is easier than depending on anyone else. 

At night, he hears the echo of a woman almost forgotten, a woman screaming that he is not her child, and no more than a demon. But he pushes it away again, building up his defenses against it, not listening. Not caring. Can't care. 

His grip is stronger now, and he proves it to the old woman, shattering in a single hand an ancient vase. He grins, older now and cocky, self-assured in his ability, in the powerful grip capable of crushing a man's neck in his eight-year-old hand, and in his knowledge learned from those ancient tomes he buries himself in. But the old woman isn't impressed. Brittle fingers still close around his neck, hold him in place, and though he twists and turns and pulls at those fingers, they hold him fast. 

"You're still nothing compared to me, little boy. You're not ready yet to inherit the serpent and my eyes." 

Now he's older, only a few months, but stronger. He has learned what he can from the volumes of old myth and legend, spell books, history books, science and alchemy. He knows of his kind, how they are hunted, and how he will be, too, how he is different from everyone else in the world, how he is yet still different now from even his own. 

The old woman calls for him, and he comes as he always does. 

"I've taught you all I can, Ban. There's only one more thing you need to know." 

He looks up into those electric blue eyes, bright and alive and young, while her body is shriveled and dying, and suddenly they change, becoming serpent eyes, and he's thrown backward. He's awake but dreaming, visions coming to him one after another, each one more convoluted and strange than the one before it. It seems to go on forever, but when it shatters, and he finds himself lying flat on the floor, gasping for breath and eyes wide, horrified, he realizes only a minute has passed. 

The old woman's eyes are dull now, and he knows what she's done. That power of hers she has given to him, he can feel it in his eyes, how things seem so much clearer now, and in the soft hiss in his arm. 

For his ninth birthday, she gives him the Jagan and Asclepius, and then she sends him away. 

He pours over more tomes now, not in a library, but at a kitchen table, listening to an ancient witch yet so young and bright hum a tune. She welcomed him with open arms, but both of them know he doesn't want to be there. He's restless, even as he reads the volumes, one after another. He's learned all he can from books. He wants more, wants to experience things, wants to not be locked inside a cage and sheltered from the world. 

She tells him that he was sent to her because his life was in danger. He listens, understands, but doesn't care. He's heard it all before. He's heard those words. How he must die for the sake of the family, how he is a demon, how he is strange and abnormal. He still hears those words echoed in dreams and nightmares, the only place they live now. 

He stays with her only for as long as he has to, and when he goes, she lets him. He tries to sneak away in the night, quiet and unnoticed, but she's there, smiling and asking what he's up to. 

"I'm leaving," he answers, and she doesn't seem to mind. Only smiles more, lifts her hand, and waves. 

"Take care." 

He goes then, wanders the world, searches for something, anything at all. He can't find what he's looking for. Not when he doesn't know what it is he's looking for at all. 

He lives day by day, scraping for change. Not many people want to hire a bratty kid to do anything for them. Sometimes he finds a part time job, and he stays there long enough to have food and shelter for a few weeks, and then he's gone again. He has little money to his name, and the clothes on his back are ratty and torn. Some nights, he sleeps in the gutters, other nights in abandoned buildings, pieces of cardboard his blanket. 

He thinks of going back to the witch, back to Maria, where he was safe, but he won't. He's only eleven, but he has pride. He won't go crawling back like a dog with his tail between his legs. 

So he survives, day by day, and though the nights are cold and lonely, he's living them. 

Then he's fifteen and he's met Kudou Yamato. He learns about a sort of underground agency in Shinjuku, a society of repossessors, snatchers, transporters, and protectors. It's easy work, and he can depend on his brute strength to keep him fed and alive. Whatever job comes, he takes it, snatching and transporting and protecting. He's starting to make a name for himself when he hears of Kudou Yamato, a man teamed up with his younger sister and one of the best snatchers in the business. 

He meets him by chance. He's bleeding, not much, but his head is still swimming from the blow he took. They weren't too much for him. No one was too much for the invincible Midou Ban-sama. But there were so many of them, they caught him from behind, and down he'd gone. Maybe he'd blacked out. He can't remember. But when he comes to, he's looking into the face of an older man, dark and shadowed, and then the man flips open a lighter and his face is suddenly illuminated in a dull orange glow. 

"You look like shit," he says, and the boy snarls, scrambling to his feet. He stumbles, and the man reaches out, catching him. He twists immediately from the grip. Can't stand to have people touch him. Can't stand to have people within a few inches of him, most of the time, and this guy is breaking both those rules, a hand on his shoulder, and so close he can smell his clothes thick with cigarette smoke. 

"I don't need your help," he hisses, and he knows he blacks out then, because when he comes to, he's in a warm bed in a sunlit room. 

"Hey!" A cheerful, bright voice breaks through. "Big brother, he's awake." 

The guy introduces himself and his sister. Kudou Yamato and Himiko. After some jabbing and nettling on both their parts, he answers with his own name. 

"Ban. Midou Ban." 

They treat his wounds, give him food, and when he doesn't thank them and rips off the bandages a few days later, they don't mind. Yamato smiles, shakes his head, and Himiko rolls her eyes, commenting to her brother what a jerk he picked up. 

Yamato says he can stay with them as long as he needs to heal, and he snorts, saying he doesn't need more than a day. But the day turns into two days, and two days into a week, and two weeks into three, until suddenly he wakes up one morning and realizes he's still there, he hasn't gone yet, and neither of the Kudou children have asked him to leave. 

So instead they ask him to stay, invite him to be a snatcher with them, and because he has no where else to go and no one to turn to, he agrees. 

Now a year has gone by, and he's still with them, still snatching, still bickering with Himiko, still watching Yamato in awe and admiration. But as the year draws to a close, and Yamato's twenty-eighth birthday approaches, things change. He doesn't look to him in awe anymore. Now he looks to him in confusion and horror, and when Yamato tells him of the curse, that he and Himiko are the last of the Voodoo children, he remembers those years spent with books spread out before him and reading about the enemies of his kind and the cursed children. 

He realizes he's trapped, caught up in a web with those his kind would sooner run from, but he can't. He stays, and when Yamato asks him to protect Himiko, save her from the curse, he promises him he will. 

Now his hand is through Yamato's chest. The blood is still warm when he stands and realizes what he's done. He's killed his only friend to save him from his curse. But Himiko won't believe those words. When she screams, crumbles to her knees by the fallen body of her brother, he walks away, and he doesn't look back. Can't look back. 

Walking away then, he hears the voice of the old woman, warning him that his life will be filled with hardships because of the eyes and snake he inherited. But more than that he hears the voice of that crushed, sobbing woman, screaming out that he is a demon's child, that he is not hers, that he could not have been born of her. 

Mugenjou is a dark shadow he walks willingly into. Doesn't know where else to go. Doesn't have anywhere else to go. He's heard the rumors, of the fearsome Volts who rule over Shinjuku, of the infamous Lightning Emperor, of the blonde demon, the ruthless killer. He doesn't believe them. He wants to meet this famed emperor, and if he dies, then so be it. 

He walks into Mugenjou a death seeker. 

It doesn't take much to draw out the emperor. Broken bodies littered around him, the rain pouring down and washing away the blood, Raitei emerges. He isn't impressed. Just some brat kid, running around and playing king in a lawless fortress, because all these pathetic people are too scared to stand up to him. But the voice that speaks to him is soft, laid heavily with a burden he can't begin to comprehend. It's the warning that catches his interest, soft spoken as it is, but lined with a deadly threat. 

"Leave here." 

"Not a chance in hell, lightning kid." 

Then he sees the brat is what the rumors say and more. Electricity courses through him like blood through his veins, and he's blinded by the harsh white light. He moves fast, but the snake is fast, too, and they match stride for stride, strike for strike. Their battles rage on for days, weeks, a month, and there is no end in sight. 

He learns his enemy. He knows the most basic fundamental rule of fighting is to know what he is up against, and he knows Raitei. Sometimes he thinks the rumors are right, when he sees him lit up in that bright, blinding glow, and watches electricity course over him, a current of energy. The rumors are true when he finds him standing with bodies cascaded around him, blood dripping from his finger tips. 

But the rumors lie, too. In those moments he finds him, there is regret in those eyes, pure, raw pain, and the rumors say nothing of that. The rumors say nothing of a sixteen year old kid who smiles when he watches children play their games or ruffles the hair of a small silver-haired boy that tags along at his heels. The rumors don't speak of his soft voice and that strange charisma. He finds himself drawn to it, whether or not he wants to be, whether or not he can do anything to stop it, and he doesn't like what it's doing to him. 

He challenges him day by day, and the thunder emperor always answers his challenge, but there is no mirth in it. So they fight, on and on, and all of Mugenjou is shaken. 

He's standing now at the edge of a crater made by none other than the infamous Raitei, and he smirks, lighting up a cigarette with a lighter belonging to a dead man. "Isn't this your home? Have some restraint." 

The lightning kid answers him, soft and quiet and sad. He can't. He becomes the lightning emperor and seeks only to destroy, and as long as he is in Mugenjou, as long as he is the leader of the Volts, that is how it will always be. 

So he shrugs and replies, "So just leave." 

Now they are walking together, snake and thunder emperor, away from Mugenjou and into the world. He stops, looking over his shoulder at the quiet emperor taken from his domain, and the kid looks up at him with a smile he never saw inside the fortress. He never looks back as they walk away. 

They're the Get Backers now, the best damn recovery service in the world, and after stumbling through it together, slowly making their way, they learn to cope and work together. Assignments come in one after another, and he's earning a name for himself again, but now it's as Midou Ban the recovery agent, not Midou Ban the ruthless fighter. He's accompanied by the lightning kid now, too, and he's learned to call him Ginji. 

He's bemused when Ginji starts calling him Ban-chan, but he lets it go. A part of him is just glad to see a smile on his face that isn't lined with such sorrow and sadness. 

"Hurry, Ban-chan!" he shouts, and he answers to the name, ambling on with hands shoved deep in his pockets. Ginji calls, and he comes. 

He remembers being alone, never believing in anyone or anything, but Ginji makes that all change. Suddenly he finds himself depending on him, trusting his partner, and he can't begin to think of him not being there. 

Assignments come in, and he meets Himiko again. She blames him, hates him for what he did to Yamato, and he doesn't apologize. Can't apologize. It was what Yamato wanted, what he had to do, and apologizing for it would be an insult to the name Kudou Yamato. So he lets her blame him, if that's what she wants to do, if she has to have someone to blame. He doesn't tell her about the curse. Can't bring himself to say the words. Someday he'll tell her, but not now. 

The broken Volts spill out of their fortress, too, and he and Ginji are wound up in the retrieval of a stolen violin, and he meets the monkey trainer. Then the thread spool, the art thief Clayman, Makubex and his gang in Mugenjou, and countless other faces he barely remembers. All of them pass through his memory in a flash of images. 

In Mugenjou, he realizes for all his shields, blocking out all his memories, shutting himself away and trying to depend only on himself, the only person he can, that Ginji has broken through. Ginji has shattered all those shields, and when he sees electricity cutting through the virtual reality, hears Ginji calling his name though he is no where near him, he runs. Runs as fast as he can to where his partner is, to where Raitei has consumed him, and stops him from becoming the thunder emperor once more. 

He remembers he can't think of life without Ginji now. 

Sometimes, he wakes up and hears the voice of the old woman, feels the snake hiss in his arm, and sees the crying woman crumbled in her bed. But then he looks over and finds Ginji, sleeping beside him in their cramped car, and it's okay. 

But now the images are bleeding together, memories of his childhood, voices distant and he can't hear them anymore, can't make out their words, and he can't make sense of the images flashing before him. He sees his grandmother, Maria, the monkey trainer, Himiko, Yamato, Ginji, all of them, all bleeding together and he can't make sense of any of it. It's all lost, mixed up, and he doesn't know where he is anymore, who he is anymore. 

"Ban-chan!" 

Ginji, somewhere, but he can't find him. He tries to answer, but no sound comes, and he hears Ginji calling his name again and again, and then it fades, mixed in with other empty, hollow voices. He can't hear him anymore. 

An assignment. A retrieval, some artifact requested by a museum curator, some supposed mythical object found on the island of Avalon. Bull shit, he had thought, but Ginji was interested, and the pay was good. So they went, and the protectors they were up against were some of the toughest bastards the Get Backers had ever been up against. 

But who were the Get Backers? 

He'd used the Jagan. Once, twice, three times, and then Ginji was on the ground, Ginji was hurt and bleeding, and he was running out of options. So he opened his eyes and let loose with the Jagan again. 

What was the Jagan? 

It got dark then, he remembers, suddenly dark, and then those memories flooded in. 

What the hell was going on? 

"Ban-chan!" 

He hears Ginji again, and he tries to answer. But he can't find him. In the dark and in the convoluted, mixed memories, he can't see him. Ginji cries out again, and it's strained, choked, "Ban-chan, please!" 

Please what, he wonders. What the hell can he do if he can't see him? 

He closes his eyes to the flood of memories, voices, feelings. And soon they fade, one after another, one image bleeding away, one voice echoing and then dying. The last voice to go is his, Ginji calling out his name, and then silence. 

It's quiet, and Midou Ban thinks maybe he's died.


End file.
